Boyan Slat Quotes

We might work on ways to prevent plastic getting into the ocean in the first place.

We absolutely need to clean up the plastic that's already in the ocean. It won't go away by itself. But we do also need to make sure that no more plastic enters the oceans in the first place. These things should go hand in hand.

Our beaches should not be garbage dumps. Our oceans must not be cesspools.

To truly rid the oceans of plastic, what we need to do is two things: One, we need to clean up the legacy pollution, the stuff that has been accumulating for decades and doesn't go away by itself. But, two, we need to close the tap, which means preventing more plastic from reaching the oceans in the first place.

Truly, the only way to prove that we can rid the oceans of plastic is to actually go out there and deploy the world's first ocean-cleaning system.

Plastic doesn't have to be ocean plastic pollution.

I became interested in ocean issues in the 1980s when I couldn't take my daughters swimming because of pollution at our local beach. Twenty-five years later, I'm a board member of Oceana, the world's largest international organization dedicated to ocean conservation.

On the face of it there is a pristine white sandy beach, but within an hour, around 100 of us can collect up to 250-300 kilos of rubbish. It's mostly bits of plastic, fishing line, nylon, bottle caps. We've found everything.

The way the clean-up system works is that we let the plastic come to us, using the ocean currents in our advantage.

There are already dozens of organizations working on trying to prevent plastic from going into the ocean, through advocacy, education, awareness, all great work, yet nobody was addressing the stock of existing pollution.

These garbage patches won't go away by themselves.

We started solely concentrating on cleaning up the Garbage Patch because we felt it was the most neglected part of the spectrum of solutions.

For 60 years man has been putting plastic into the ocean. And from that day onward we're also taking it back out again.

Taking care of the world's ocean garbage problem is one of the largest environmental challenges mankind faces today.

Cut down on your use of plastic shopping bags because many end up in the ocean.

There is a terribly terrestrial mindset about what we need to do to take care of the planet - as if the ocean somehow doesn't matter or is so big, so vast that it can take care of itself, or that there is nothing that we could possibly do that we could harm the ocean.

The seas need their own Kyoto Protocol.

I want to do everything I can in my own life to protect and preserve the ocean.

Everyone said to me: 'Oh there's nothing you can do about plastic once it gets into the oceans,' and I wondered whether that was true.

We could truly make our oceans clean again.

You go to a beach, you see a lot of plastic. It's out of the ocean, it stays out of the ocean, so that's good. But the thing is that in this Great Pacific garbage patch, this area twice the size of Texas, there's simply no coastlines to collect plastic. So the idea is to have these very long floating barriers.

It's nice there is a cleanup system, but if it doesn't collect any plastic, it's not very useful.

When I started there was this consensus that you could never clean this up, that the problem is way too big, the ocean is way too rough, the issue of bycatch - 'plastic is too big, plastic is too small.'

I guess over the course of time, I started to open up to a lot of the issues surrounding the oceans. From my personal experience, being out in the water and seeing plastics floating around and thinking they are jellyfish and realizing they're plastic bags. I'm always that guy that will take it into the shore.

The worst is yet to come, because all the plastic that is already out there is going to become more hazardous if we don't clean it up.